Day 1, Monday: In Which Our Heroine Eats Like a Stray Cat

Here's what I ate on this day.

8:45 am: hardboiled egg on my way to teach 

11:00 am: hardboiled egg after teaching

3:00 pm: two slices of turkey and a 1 by 3 inch strip of goat cheese

7:00 pm: pickles and olives at Falafelly Yours (local Mediterranean awesomeness), followed by mixed-meat shwarma over Greek salad. Hoping whatever they cooked the shwarma in doesn't have sugar.

Okay, not too proud of this day. I had gotten home at 4:00 in the morning the night before (driving back from Chicago) and I was decidedly at low ebb. Consequently, I fell into one of the traps that I try to avoid on any food plan: eating "approved" stuff, but at random times, with little thought put into it, and consequently with no pleasure.

It's not enough, in my opinion, to eat the "approved" stuff. I want to eat the "approved" stuff with gusto.  I want my meals to be home-made. I want to eat at regular times. I want the foods to go well together. I want to eat stuff that is appropriate to the meal I'm eating. Like, I don't want to have meatloaf for breakfast. I don't want scrambled eggs for dinner. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that (I'm not judging anybody!) but eating like that makes me feel like I am one step away from living on the streets. As my yoga history teacher Douglas Brooks says, there's a big difference between cuisine and food. Food is what you COULD eat. Cuisine is what you WOULD eat, what you'd WANT to eat. I may be Sugar Detox-ing but I want cuisine.

Day One did not go so well in this respect. I can't quite put Day One's food into meal categories. I ate at odd times. I ate the turkey and cheese standing at the kitchen counter--BIG no-no in my book. Never eat over the sink! And if you can, use a cloth napkin. Makes a meal so much more humane. I ate the eggs on the way to work which is also a big no-no in my book, and yet is something I do easily four days a week. However, I give myself a pass about all this stuff, because if there's one thing I try to remember about the Detox, it's that I do it to FEEL BETTER about myself. So while I will undoubtedly go against my own rules/preferences during the three weeks, and I will very likely fall off the wagon a couple of times, I don't care. I give myself a big squooshy hug, and say, "way to go, Emma! You didn't use a cloth napkin, but you ALSO didn't spend the entire afternoon eating Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups and napping!" That's progress, folks.